Recently interest has been growing in wearable processing devices, such as a smart watch, bracelet, necklace, item of clothing or pair of glasses. The wearable processing device may be worn in the same way as a regular item of clothing or accessory, but may be provided with some processing capability to allow the device to carry out various functions, such as GPS monitoring or email mailbox functions for example.
One potential use for a wearable processing device is to trigger a function on another data processing apparatus when the wearable processing device is detected to be in proximity to the other processing apparatus. The proximity detection may be based on wireless signals exchanged by the wearable processing device and data processing apparatus. However, different wearable processing devices may have different characteristics affecting the wireless signals and so typically some calibration is required to control the point at which the wearable processing device is detected to be in proximity to the processing apparatus. The present technique seeks to improve the calibration of such proximity detection.
Viewed from a first aspect, the present invention provides a method comprising steps of:
detecting proximity of a wearable processing device to a data processing apparatus based on wireless signals received by the data processing apparatus from the wearable processing device;
detecting a user input operation comprising a physical interaction with the data processing apparatus for controlling the data processing apparatus; and
in response to detecting the user input operation, calibrating at least one detection parameter for the proximity detecting step.
To calibrate the proximity detection of a wearable processing device based on wireless signals received by a data processing apparatus from the wearable processing device, one might expect that it would be necessary to instruct the user to place the wearable processing device a predetermined distance away from the data processing apparatus, and to then calibrate the proximity detection based on a property of the wireless signals measured when the wearable processing device is at the predetermined location. However, it can be frustrating for the user to have to stop what they are doing in order to place the wearable processing device at the predetermined location for such a calibration operation, especially if the calibration needs to be performed relatively often.